August 15, 2008

But I wanted to put this up, because I should have put it up when I made my point back here about the way a design for a beautiful exterior of a building should produce a beautiful interior to be truly beautiful. Do you agree with this aesthetic principle?

Read "From Bauhaus to Our House" by Tom Wolfe. He maintains that the skills required to build good buildings are still known by practicing workers. What is missing is budget. In every project, from an addition on an existing house to a brand new structure, budget is the limiting factor.

Of course, Victor Hugo argued that literacy is what killed good architecture - if information could be passed to the masses through books then buildings no longer had to convey history or important stories. Was he correct? I read his book, so there you go...

The WI State Capitol (not Madison's). Anyway, my daughter's day care would take trips down the capitol and do just that - lie on the floor and look at the ceiling. The kids always got a big kick out of it.

When I was a kid, we siblings played a game from the back seat of the car to see who could spot the capital first whenever we were driving back into town. Of course, it wasn't very challenging on the oft traveled routes, because we all knew the spot where that would occur.

It turns out that a childhood classmate of mine is serving in the WI legislature. Next time I’m back in the Madcity I’m going try and weasal access to that secret balcony that surrounds that highest most ring of windows (barely visible in the photo and not open to the GP). Anybody here ever been up there?

Right. Among the other points my close personal friend Tom Wolfe made were: sloped roofs are bourgeois, flat roofs were nonbourgeois and therefore good. The elimination of hand work and the reliance on machine made parts - also good. Marxist architecture was by definition bourgeois-proof. Lintels, overhangs, decoration - all bad. Beige bricks good. Columns bad. Having the know-it-all architect's client take it like a man - best of all.

My previous comment referred to a story that Mr. Wolfe related early in book about the stone masons in NYC being put out of work. As a skilled worker myself I know for a fact that the skills remain, employment is the issue. It always boils down to budget.

Mr. Wolfe is my close personal friend because I talked to him for 90 seconds while he autographed my copy of From Bauhaus to Our House. I tried to use that book when teaching architecture - the students were too dim to get it. More's the pity.

Both the exterior and interior of the Wisconsin Capitol are beautiful, but neither is a completely faithful reflection of the other.

For example, the interior dome visible from the rotunda floor is really a shell inside of the exterior shell; the stairway up over the oculus to the lantern goes through a strange stark gray/white space that was really quite vast from what I recall.

There are other places where the two public faces of the building are a bit disjointed. A number of 'banana rooms' (named for their odd shape) exist that are essentially windowless leftover spaces used primarily for storage - spaces that resulted from the attempt to negotiate the exterior and interior goals. I believe they're located behind the four principal mosaic murals seen from the floor, although I can't remember precisely which staircases one uses to reach them.

In general, yes, the building's exterior influences the curvaceous lines inside, but there are some tricks, too. It's not an entirely seamless mirroring.